First published February 11, 2020.
If you are tracing African American ancestors back past 1870, the records of the Freedmen's Bureau are one of the best places to look. The Bureau, a federal agency that worked in the former Confederate states from 1865 to 1872, wrote down the names of hundreds of thousands of formerly enslaved people and Southern refugees in labour contracts, ration lists, marriage registers, hospital logs and letters. Volunteers have now indexed and transcribed these pages, and they can be searched free of charge online.
The project was widely reported as making about 1.8 million names searchable. That figure counts name entries, not unique people: one person can appear many times, and the records also include white refugees. Even so, for many families these pages hold the first written trace of an ancestor under their own name, recorded only months after slavery ended.
Why the 1870 census is a wall, and how the Bureau gets past it
Before emancipation, enslaved people were rarely recorded by name in public documents. The federal censuses of 1850 and 1860 counted them on separate "slave schedules" that listed only an owner's name with the age, sex and colour of each person held. The 1870 census was the first to list most formerly enslaved people by name, which is why genealogists often speak of the "1870 brick wall".
The Freedmen's Bureau records sit right against that wall. Created between 1865 and 1872, they can connect a person seen in 1870 to a former plantation, a former enslaver's surname, a spouse from before the war, or a child sold away. They are not complete, and many people never dealt with the Bureau at all, but they are often the bridge researchers need.
What the Freedmen's Bureau was
Its formal name was the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands. Congress created it on 3 March 1865, in the last weeks of the Civil War and of Abraham Lincoln's life. Because Congress gave it no budget of its own at first, it was placed in the War Department, which had money and people already in the South. Its commissioner was Union general Oliver Otis Howard.
The Bureau handed out food, clothing and fuel to destitute freedpeople and to some poor white refugees. It oversaw labour contracts between freedpeople and planters, ran or supported hospitals, recorded marriages that slavery had never allowed to be legal, helped separated families find one another, and acted in local disputes where courts would not give Black people a fair hearing.
Education was one of its most lasting areas of work. By the end of 1865, its schools enrolled more than 90,000 students. Working with missionary groups such as the American Missionary Association, the Bureau also helped establish about 25 colleges and training schools. Howard University in Washington, D.C., founded in 1867 and named after the commissioner, is the best-known. The Bureau supported several early historically Black colleges, but it did not create the whole HBCU system, which also grew out of churches, private donors and later state and federal laws.
Opposition, violence and an early end
The agency was controversial from the start. President Andrew Johnson vetoed a bill to extend it in 1866, and Congress overrode him. Many white Southerners saw its agents as intruders, and Ku Klux Klan violence targeted freedpeople, teachers and Bureau officers alike.
The Bureau also had real failings. It was understaffed, often pushed freedpeople to sign year-long contracts with former enslavers, and its promise of land largely collapsed when confiscated estates were returned to their former owners. By 1869 most of its funding had been cut. Congress closed it in 1872, so quietly that Howard, away on duty in Arizona, reportedly learned the news months later.
That history is worth keeping in mind as you read its files. The clerks wrote with the attitudes and spelling of their time, and the documents reflect the agency's power over the people it served.
How the records were digitised
The original papers are held by the US National Archives, which microfilmed them after Congress passed the Freedmen's Bureau Preservation Act in 2000. Between June 2015 and June 2016, the genealogy organisation FamilySearch, the National Archives, the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) and other partners ran the Freedmen's Bureau Project. More than 25,000 volunteers read the microfilmed pages and typed names, dates and places into a searchable index.
A second effort went further. Through the Smithsonian Transcription Center, volunteers have been typing out the full text of each page, not just the names. The NMAAHC describes it as the largest crowdsourcing project the Smithsonian has sponsored, covering more than 1.7 million images. By mid-2025, volunteers had transcribed roughly 1.5 million pages. Full text matters because it lets you search for a plantation, a county, a church or a phrase, not only a name.
How to search the Freedmen's Bureau records
A sensible order of work for a family historian looks like this:
- Start with what you know. Find your ancestor in the 1870 and 1880 censuses and note their age, county, spouse and children.
- Search the indexes. Use the NMAAHC's Freedmen's Bureau Search Portal, which searches indexed names, places and dates and the transcribed text at once. The Discover Freedmen site created with FamilySearch is another entry point.
- Try many spellings. Clerks wrote what they heard. Search first names with the county, and test surnames of local landowners, since some people kept or later changed an enslaver's surname.
- Open the original image. An index gives a name; the page may show relatives, a former enslaver, wages, a complaint or a marriage date that the index leaves out.
- Read around the entry. Ration lists and labour contracts often list whole households or work groups, which can reveal neighbours and kin.
- Cross-check. Compare what you find with census, church, Freedman's Savings Bank and court records before deciding two entries are the same person.
Volunteer-run sites such as Freedmen's Bureau Online also offer transcribed samples by state, including labour records, marriage registers and reports of violence against freedpeople, which are useful for learning what each record type contains.
Common misunderstandings
"Everyone freed in 1865 is in the database." No. Coverage varies by state and by local office, and many families had no dealings with the Bureau. A failed search is not proof an ancestor was absent.
"1.8 million names means 1.8 million freed people." The number counts entries, including repeats and white refugees. Around four million people were freed by the end of the war.
"The Bureau founded all historically Black colleges." It helped found or fund a number of them, but churches, missionary societies and later land-grant laws created many others.
Why these names matter
For a long time, many African American families were told their history was impossible to trace. These records do not solve that alone, but they put names, places and sometimes voices back into the story: a woman registering her marriage, a man complaining about unpaid wages, a parent searching for a child. For descendants, finding one of those entries can be the moment a family tree stops at a question mark and starts to grow again.
Sources: National Museum of African American History and Culture: Freedmen's Bureau Records; Wikipedia: Freedmen's Bureau; Discover Freedmen (FamilySearch); Freedmen's Bureau Online.
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